Maintenance.

We maintain a lot of things in this life, don’t we? Cars, homes, appliances, pets, health, appearance, relationships, and the list goes on. Mainly, it’s the things in our lives we value that find us taking the extra steps needed to keep them in good working order. Sometimes it’s the expense to fix them that drives us to make sure they don’t break down, but in some cases its the threat of an emotional toll that makes the additional work and attention worthwhile.

We move our schedules around to make time for maintenance, cancelling appointments to meet technicians at the house, or opting for a drive-thru at lunch to make time for an oil change. We spend quite a bit of money on it, too. Maintenance is a multimillion dollar industry, across the board, if you lump it all together. Multibillion, if you include makeup and plastic surgery!

I was in church yesterday, standing and singing a familiar worship song by David Crowder, when we got to a particular lyric that I’ve sung a hundred times but have never really heard.

I don’t have time to maintain these regrets when I think about the way…
He loves us, oh, how He loves us, oh how He loves us, oh How He loves

Maintain these regrets? Seriously?

We carry regrets like baggage, certainly, but I’ve never – not once – thought about the fact that we maintain them.

But we do.

We take care of them and arrange our lives around them, esteeming them every time we roll those “what if’s” and “if only’s” around in our mouths like the choicest morsels. There’s no other way to look at it:

We highly value our regrets.

And, really, the very act of maintaining our regrets is not saving us expense, folks. It’s costing us, falling into a high maintenance category, because to maintain our regrets causes us to continually live in the past where we have no options or means of changing the outcome. It wastes our lives going forward, and trips us up as we walk with our heads looking behind. I don’t know about you, but I think that’s a pretty high price to pay.

Like the song says, we don’t have time to maintain regrets. Time on our life-clock is ticking. And if God loves us enough to not catalog our mistakes and failures, removing them as far from us as the east is from the west, maybe we shouldn’t waste valuable life cataloging them either. Maybe we should focus ahead, running, grateful, into the fullness of what’s to come.

“He has removed our sins as far from usas the east is from the west.” Psalm 103:12 NLT

“Love is patient, love is kind. It does not envy, it does not boast, it is not proud. It does not dishonor others, it is not self-seeking, it is not easily angered, it keeps no record of wrongs.” 1 Corinthians 13:4-5 NIV

“…but I focus on this one thing: Forgetting the past and looking forward to what lies ahead, I press on to reach the end of the race and receive the heavenly prize for which God, through Christ Jesus, is calling us.” Philippians 3:13-14 NLT

“Forget about what’s happened;don’t keep going over old history. Be alert, be present. I’m about to do something brand-new.It’s bursting out! Don’t you see it?” Isaiah 43:18-19 MSG